There are many forms of compressive supports available for body parts. Historically, people with a need to provide additional support to wrists, elbows, thighs, knees and ankles used strips of cloth to wrap and support the body part. These early wraps evolved into formed braces, often including both cloth and leather and having laces to vary the compression. With the development of elastics, wraps were elasticized and evolved into specialized knit braces which incorporated the elastic into a knit structure. Many current commercial products are available using elasticized knit structures.
More recently laminated foam materials, originally developed for wet suits used in diving, were formed into compression braces for body parts. A U.S. Pat. No. 4,084,586 to Hettick teaches a variety of support devices formed from closed cell neoprene foam laminated on both sides with a thin nylon fabric. While braces prepared according to the teachings of the Hettick patent provided good support and retained warmth, they also retained moisture emitted from the skin of the user causing the user's skin covered by the brace to become saturated with moisture.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,832,010 to Lerman provided a partial solution to the retained moisture problem. The Lerman patent teaches braces formed from a closed cell neoprene foam having a stretchable porous fabric laminated to both sides of the foam. However, to address the retained moisture problem, the Lerman patent further teaches providing a multiplicity of relatively large air holes extending through and dispersed across the surface of material. The Lerman patent teachings suggest that, to maintain the compressive properties of the foam, the holes be limited to between about three and ten percent of the surface of the brace.
While a brace according to the Lerman patent provides some relief to the accumulated moisture problem seen when orthopedic braces are formed from closed cell foam, there is still a need for increasing the transport of emitted skin moisture out of an orthopedic brace and away from the skin where the brace is formed using a closed cell foam as a support component.